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I made it in jest, but I'm seriously considering sending a letter to them suggesting it. If OUYA can rack up $6mil on kickstarter for a console system, I think they can do way better with a 3 minute video saying "Man on Mars 2015, Fuck it, we'll do it live!"

"you didn't build that", if we really want to get serious about space exploration we need government riding in the drivers seat. There is just very little ROE to explore the cosmos (at least at the moment).

The Constellation program wasn't cut simply because of a lack of interest, it was a bad program. "Apollo on Steroids" was a shortsighted plan that was doomed to failure. Many space insiders breathed a sigh of relief when the Ares I and Ares V were canceled. Unfortunately, they've been more or less replaced by the Liberty Launcher and SLS. However, the SLS is such a ridiculously impractical system it will probably be canceled within a few years.

Bigger rockets aren't the whole answer. It's cost and reusability. Once the Falcon Heavy starts flying for a fraction of the SLS's staggering cost, people will start questioning why we need such a behemoth.

True, but even if it isn't reusable, the Falcon Heavy is projected to lift twice the weight of the Delta IV Heavy at 1/3 of the cost. Even if it costs twice as much as expected, it'll still be a huge improvement on the old ways of doing things. Meanwhile, the SLS will cost at least a billion dollars a launch, maybe two.

Heavy lift is important though if you want to do serious orbital construction and pave the way for interplanetary voyages. I agree though, cost must be a high priority to keep the entire endeavour sustainable.

But we're going to have to get good at it someday, no matter how big our rockets get. NASA shouldn't be concerned with how they get to orbit, they should be concerned with what they do once they get there. Invest in large scale on orbit construction, fuel depots, true spacecraft that never touch an atmosphere. Bogging them down in a congressional jobs program for a monster of a rocket is just going to slow them down.

yea too little too late, only recently did they redo their site, and start to reach out with community media portals. this stuff we've had for decades, I take it the budget cuts were what lit the fire under their asses to get noticed.

Well, last I knew, their budget was about $20 billion, but that was several years ago. I think right now it is still over $10 billion. So, if we assume that its costing $20 million with a $10 billion total budget, that is only .2%. With publicity like this, hopefully the people will realize how cool space is, and that would most likely lead to an increase in funding by quite a bit.

As for where I got the $20 million dollar figure, that was just me throwing a high-end guess. I figure it can't cost all that much to broadcast for a few hours, if even that long, in Times Square. If it did, nobody would be advertising on those screens.

Can you imagine, they actually don't have a great system it's just hooked up to some guys tv with a Kinect. There's just one big guy in charge of not fucking it all up and the game they released is actually the simulator he's been practicing on.

I don't know what kind of knowledge there is about the geology that comprises the Martian planet, but considering that oil is formed from organic material over millions and millions of years, I would assume it's possible.

It wouldn't be cost effective to transport it here anyway. Besides we need to reduce carbon output, not increase it. We could use in on Mars though, I suppose. Not sure how effective it would be considering the lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.

President: "I'm gonna wait up for awhile... see if we hear anything. it's out there somewhere. It's so close"

C.J.: "I think you should do the classroom either way."

President: "Yeah?"

C.J: "We have at our disposal a captive audience of school children, some of them don't go to the blackboard because they think they're going to be wrong. I think you should say to these kids 'You think you get it wrong sometimes? You should come down here and see how the big boys do it.' I think you should tell them that you haven't given up hope and that it may turn up, but in the meantime, you want NASA to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo VI. Some of them will laugh and most of them won't care, but for some they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand."

Now understand that it's believed the astronauts survived the initial explosion and break-apart, but died either spinning wildly out of control or on impact. Emergency switches and such were found activated when the crew module was recovered. Horrifying.

Probably not exactly the same. The Challenger disaster was a national tragedy, in no small part because actual people died. If this mission were to fail, the reaction from most people would be "Oh look, NASA fucked up again, those jerks can't do anything right. Cut their funding!" That's what happens when you're doing unmanned missions and the general public only ever pays attention to you when you make a mistake.

Well, it is as live as NASA gets it. Besides won't any cameras on the rover itself just be showing smoke, dust, fire, and maybe some blurry shots of land rushing up to meet it? I bet the live coverage will mostly be what is happening in mission control, unless a camera actually shows something discernible.

During the descent to the Martian surface, MARDI will take color images at 1600×1200 pixels with a 1.3-millisecond exposure time starting at distances of about 3.7 km to near 5 meters from the ground and will take images at a rate of 5 frames per second for about 2 minutes.[61][67] MARDI has a pixel scale of 1.5 meters at 2 km to 1.5 millimeters at 2 meters and has a 90-degree circular field of view. MARDI has 8 GB of internal buffer memory which is capable of storing over 4,000 raw images. MARDI imaging will allow the mapping of surrounding terrain and the location of landing.

Everything we experience is delayed. If you were talking right in front of me, there is still a delay in which the light bounces off your face to be reflected into my eye and then my eye sends those signals to my brain in which it interprets what is going on. There are numerous delays. We never experience anything "live".

If you are going to call anything we see as "live", then you are also saying that when we look into telescopes and see a galaxy 10 billion light years away, we are also seeing it live. That is simply untrue by any normal definition.

Basically NASA is trying to land a rover on Mars that weighs 5 times as much the previous two rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) and is about the size of a car. The trickiest, and most impressive part, is the landing, see this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o

It weighs so much that the previous tried and true method of using an airbag to cusion the landing simply will not work. They have to use a rocket to do a controlled descent, bring it to almost a hover and use a 'crane' like mechanism to lower it to the surface.

It's nearly unbelievable to me that they wouldn't do a fully integrated test. Drop the damn thing from a helicopter on the Mojave. That said, if you're able to use simulations and design tolerances to build a system that doesn't require testing of that sort, it would save a lot of time and money. I guess we're probably somewhere in the middle.

Sure. Ultimately they are the experts and the ones with their names and careers on the line...I'll happily trade the few bucks from my tax bill for the outcome. Either way we've learned, invented and done new things, sweet pictures from the surface of Mars is a cherry on top.

As they are landing in a huge crater (The Gale Crater) will Curiosity be stuck in there forever? Or is there a way once the primary research in the crater has been done, for it to move out of the crater and explore more of Mars?

It also has a nuclear power supply, which is finite, how long will Curiosity be able to run on it's power? Why did they not also include solar cells to extend it's lifetime? It is a pretty long journey to Mars after all, would it not be clever to try and keep the rovers alive as long as possible?

Curiosity is landing in a crator right next to Mount Sharp, which raises 3 miles upward from the crator floor. Curiosity's mission is to climb up through the sedimentary rock deposits to view Mar's geological history. Also, Curiosity needs more power as it is the largest rover ever sent to Mars, so solar panels won't suffice. Even though the mission is only planned for two Earth years, engineers expect that Curiosity will be a viable asset for many years after that.

Sadly, i wonder if this is going to be the last significant space-science themed endeavor; before the effects of the recent funding cuts take effect. C'mon Curiosity! survive those 7-minutes of terror!

I'm on NASA Website on the mars section where there is a countdown but is there a link or a place yet that in 4 days when it goes down i can watch it happen? (I may have overlooked it i'm a bit sleepy)

I don't think that's the whole "point" of it. It's a huge even that some people are super fuckin excited about. I can guarantee you that place will be packed. If I lived within 5 hours of there, I'd go just for the experience.

Watched the video and thought, there's no way that complicated landing will work - despite the smart minds working on this. However, this video - despite the unnecessary bad hammy presentation - explains it nicely. Fingers crossed for monday!